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  • Gone from Texas and Trading with the Enemy:New Perspectives on Civil War West Texas
  • Glen Sample Ely (bio)

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Figure 1.

John Chisum, left, and M. C. Smith on the right. Chisum, a Confederate beef contractor, started selling cattle to the Union Army at Fort Sumner in 1864. Smith worked for Chisum during 1863 and 1864. Chisum picture from James Cox, Historical and Biographical Record of the Cattle Industry and the Cattlemen of Texas and Adjacent Territory (St. Louis: Woodman & Tierman Printing Co., 1895). Smith picture from: Sidney W. Smith, From the Cow Camp to the Pulpit: Being Twenty-Five Years Experience of a Texas Evangelist (Cincinnati: The Christian Leader Corporation, 1927).

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In the spring of 1864, Texas Adjutant General Col. D. B. Culberson sent his subordinate, Capt. W. W. Reynolds, to assess conditions at Texas Ranger camps along the state's western defensive perimeter. Reynolds encountered widespread disobedience and desertion up and down the line. Arriving at Camp Colorado in Coleman County, he learned of the disappearance of two lieutenants and thirteen other men from Captain Lloyd's company, along with Captain Whiteside's entire company, excluding Whiteside and one other man. Ranger patrols from Camp Colorado also discovered that several hundred families, including deserters from Lloyd's and Whiteside's units, were forming a wagon train on the Middle Concho River, ninety miles to the west. This wagon train was part of a swelling exodus of Texans disillusioned by the Civil War who left the Lone Star State for a fresh start in California. While this mass migration troubled state and Confederate authorities, they proved powerless to interdict it. Summing up conditions on Texas's western frontier, Captain Reynolds stated, "The most perfect anarchy prevails."1

In September 1864, thirty-five miles to the southwest of Camp Colorado, at the junction of the Concho and Colorado rivers, cowboys working for Confederate beef contractor John Chisum assembled a herd for sale to the enemy at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The fall of Vicksburg in July 1863 and the loss of southern cattle markets east of the Mississippi had [End Page 439] forced Chisum and other Texas ranchers to look westward for new sales. Unlike southern livestock agents who settled their accounts with increasingly worthless Confederate currency, the Union Army paid in gold.2

These are but several striking examples that dispel a number of erroneous popular perceptions regarding Civil War West Texas. The first misconception is that the state's wartime troops, in the form of Texas Ranger militia units, adequately protected the western frontier. They failed in this endeavor. During the war, the frontier line collapsed not just once, but twice, forcing Texas to relinquish control over half of its territory. A second accepted fallacy is that Texas's legendary cattle drives to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and beyond did not commence until the close of the war, with Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving's first trip in June 1866. Goodnight often claimed that he and Loving laid out the Fort Sumner route, but wartime accounts along with Texas, Confederate, and Union records reveal that Lone Star ranchers driving their beeves to the Union Army in New Mexico blazed this trail during 1864 and 1865. Confederate beef contractor John Chisum's Concho County ranch often served as the starting point for these westward drives. These new perspectives of a collapsing frontier, Texas's abandonment of half its territory, widespread desertion and disloyalty, and trading with the enemy make for a fascinating discussion of the complex and intriguing events transpiring in West Texas during the last years of the war.3

There has been much debate over the last seventy years concerning the Texas Rangers' Civil War service. A number of scholars maintain that the Rangers failed to discharge their duties, and as a result, the frontier receded one to two hundred miles. Other writers, however, claim that the state militia successfully defended the western frontier. One historian carries this argument even further, holding that wartime Rangers outperformed federal troops stationed in Texas before the war. Admittedly, the U.S. Army failed to deter raids by Apaches, Kiowas, and...

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